I've always had a rather strong antipathy toward Buddhism as a philosophy. Yes, it gets much ethical teaching right, because the effective alleviation of suffering, which is Buddhism's central project, demands much attention to what is central to and real in human nature, and therefore can yield legitimate ethical insights into how to live, since the alleviation of suffering is a true moral end that undergirds much of morality. However, the principles and metaphysics which underlie its conclusions make those teachings have a different significance- it is a case at arriving at good conclusions about how to act and treat others by way of terrible philosophical assumptions.

Far as I can tell, Buddhism is nihilism in a nice frock, a degeneration from Hinduism (which at its best nears the heights of monotheism) rather than an improvement. It is nihilistic in its metaphysics, nihilistic in its view of human nature and opinion of creation, nihilistic in its meta-ethics, and nihilistic in its ends. Indeed, it is the most thoroughly nihilistic philosophy I have ever come across, though admittedly it is a rather better class of nihilism than most, with some legitimately good insights into metaphysics and ethics. Nevertheless, the nihilistic approach at its core is a fundamental ugliness that ought to disturb the Christian deeply.

For the Buddhist, there are "three marks" of existence that characterise their metaphysics.

The first is "Anicca," or "impermanence." From what I can tell, this is identical to Heraclitus' doctrine that there is nothing but change. Nothing truly persists- all that exists are ever-changing appearances undergone by your ever-changing fundamental constituents.

This leads to the conclusion of "annata," or "non-self," when applied to human nature. There is, on this view, no "you," per se, since a person is nothing more than a bunch of physical and psychological components constantly in flux. Persons as such, therefore, don't actually exist, though the individual components of a mind, such as one's thoughts, experiences, desires and sufferings, do exist. This is, of course, nothing more than mreological nihilism, a denial of the existence of the self itself, in favour of reducing it to its parts.

The last is Dhukka- often translated as "suffering," or "disquietude," for Buddhism it is something that pervades all of reality, and a quality that characterises firstly suffering, secondly change or impermanence, and lastly "conditionedness," what we might call "contingency." Impermanence, imperfection, and lack characterise everything, so the Buddhist contends, and it is our wrestling with this that produces disquietude and suffering. Buddhism thus locates the source of suffering in the very fabric of contingent and composite existence. The project of Buddhism is in confronting this reality, and thereby liberating oneself from cultivating undue attachment to that which is impermanent and thus inherently unsatisfactory in the long run.

There is much that the Christian can agree with, here- that worldly goods are transistory and not ultimately satisfactory, that we have desires that can never be quenched by the things of this world. Where Christianity, however, seeks the fulfilment of all these desires, and to put attachments to goods earthly and transistory, and heavenly and eternal, the Buddhist project despairs from the beginning of any heavenly eternal goods, and seeks only the cessation of suffering through the gradual extinguishing of attachment and desire, rather than the redemption of desire into its proper order with the right ends in place.

These basic assumptions, in my view, make the Buddhist project, doomed from the beginning. Morality, on such a system, cannot be a matter of fulfilling one's obligations, or performing actions which are objectively value-worthy, but of performing actions that are conducive to eventually realizing one's own non-existence, and so is meta-ethically vacuous- it cannot ground either value or duty. The supreme end, the cessation of suffering through negating the self, is inherently pessimistic and nihilistic. Of course, in the course of arriving at the highest level of the cessation of suffering through the negation of the self, they do pursue many other wholesome, indeed highly virtuous ends, but the very worth of these ends is in my view undermined by Buddhism's highly perverse view of both the self and nature and the appropriateness of the desires that bind us to it.